The most common “critique” of the #mencallmethings hashtag that blew up on Twitter last week was that the women posting examples of misogynistic shit they got called online were making a big deal out of nothing. As the always-charming Ferdinand Bardamu so memorably put it:
It’s funny, then, that when MRAs find themselves described with less-than-flattering language they have a strange tendency to act like they’ve suddenly been struck with a case of the vapors. Witness the reaction of MRAs when someone calls them the “c-word.” No, not “cunt” – “creep.” As one outraged Men’s Rights Redditor recently put it, in a comment with 30+ net upvotes:
Creep shaming is probably one of the most insidious and anti-equality things you can do. The ability to label men as “creepy” is just one privilege that women enjoy, and a constant source of fear of ostracizing that all men must fear in our society.
When MRAs feel themselves being oppressed by such clearly man-hating language, they often refer to something called the Catalogue of Anti-Male Shaming Tactics, which, well, catalogues their language grievances in detail. According to the author of the Catalogue,
Shaming tactics are emotional devices meant to play on a man’s insecurities and shut down debate. They are meant to elicit sympathy for women and to demonize men who ask hard questions. Most, if not all, shaming tactics are basically ad homimem attacks.
Such shaming tactics, the author of the Catalogue says, with no evident awareness of the irony, are often used by “histrionic … female detractors who refuse to argue their points with logic” and the male “gynocentrists” who ally with them.
Here are some of the awful “shaming” remarks that get directed at MRAs, according to the Catalogue of Shaming Tactics:
“Stop whining!”
“Suck it up like a man!”
“You need to get over your anger at women.”
“You’re afraid of a strong woman!”
“You are so immature!”
“You are just bitter because you can’t get laid.”
“Are you gay?”
“That’s a sexist stereotype!”
“You need therapy.”
“You make me feel afraid.”
“Weirdo!”
“Loser!”
“You are so materialistic.”
“No woman will marry you with that attitude.”
“You are insensitive to the plight of women.”
Is that last one even an insult? It’s a fairly accurate description of a lot of MRAs, who take a certain pride in being “insensitive to the plight of women.”
So now that we’ve seen the horrible abuse that MRAs have to put up with on a daily basis, let’s take a quick look at some of the things that women and feminists regularly get from their detractors, as posted to the #mencallmethings hashtag and sent to Sady Doyle, who originated the hashtag. (These are all taken from a great post she did in the aftermath of #mencallmethings’ big blowup.) I think you will find the comparison instructive. Let’s start with the more straightforward slurs. (TRIGGER WARNING for, well, just about everything in the quotes that follow.)
Slut, cunt, bitch, whore, ugly, dyke, lesbo, unfuckable, crazy, delusional, liar, hysterical, autistic bitch child, feminazi, ballbuster, humorless, heartless whore, man hater, misandrist, stupid little girl, shrieky hysterical moron, airhead, spoiled little princess, stupid bitch, stupid fucking cunt, stupid feminazi cunt, an ugly bitter little woman, cumm guzzling closet lesbian, a pseudo-intellectual Insane Oversensitive Humourless Female supremacist.
Now let’s move on to complete sentences:
“You’re an ugly fucking cunt.”
“That sort of smirk is why God invented anal sex.”
“you’re so ugly you look like you have downs syndrome, you’d be thankful to be raped.”
“hope you catch a sexually transmitted disease or vagina cancer, cuntwit.”
”Stick a dildo up your dry vagina.”
“the only time your mouth should be open is when i’m putting my d–k in it”
“Your just a gay cunt who deserves to be punished.”
“A firm backhand to her whore face would provide her with a much needed attitude adjustment.”
“Fuck you bitch….ya need to get beat like ur pops use to do to u.”
“I hope you never have children, your daughters would be such sluts and end up murdered in a gutter by someone like me.”
You’re “not worth the effort to murder.”
“[The] only tragedy is that a bullet didn’t rip through ur brainstem after u were used 4 ur 1 & only purpose in this world.”
“what a long winded bitch. You certainly do need to be gagged.”
“You’re an annoying bitch with no friends.I’d love to run you over with my truck.”
“you stupid bitch, I should fuck the crazy right out of you.”
”i surely hope that one day you get raped.”
“[You] can’t be a female scientist, that phrase is an oxymoron,”
“it’s painfully obvious you’re a woman, get off the internet.”
“I will fuck your ass to death you filthy fucking whore. Your only worth on this planet is as a warm hole.”
“Do you need to file a hurt feelings report?”
As I noted before, despite my general unpopularity in the MRA world, I tend to get fewer of these things than, for example, most feminist bloggers with a similar degree of internet notoriety. But I get them. Here, for example, is the latest comment I’ve gotten from the guy who calls himself Nugganu, a sort of follow-up to a previous comment I quoted earlier in which he imagined me raped by ten black men:
He certainly does have a vivid imagination.
But, yeah, somehow it’s a little hard for me to feel a ton of sympathy for MRAs who so regularly work themselves into a lather over “shaming language” like “creep” and “loser” and “you are insensitive to the plight of women.”
It’s almost as if they think that women deserve to be called those names and threatened with those things.
Men, of course, need to be treated with kid gloves if they are MRAs, because they are so much more delicate than women.
I find it telling that when describing gang rape scenarios, a lot of MRAs make sure it’s black men doing the raping. What’s with that?
Comments like nugganu’s… I don’t understand why some people are so eager to go “You should be punished — with sex!” A bukkake session with ten guys, where everyone involved was consenting, is not inherently evil. It’s like, does nugganu *want* people to associate sex with punishment, and go “sex, ewww!” or what?
Sorry this is incoherent. I just, just don’t understand.
I was completely unaware that “creepy” was a gendered insult. Shows what I know.
“Creep shaming is probably one of the most insidious and anti-equality things you can do. The ability to label men as “creepy” is just one privilege that women enjoy, and a constant source of fear of ostracizing that all men must fear in our society.”
God, it’s the internet! Stop whining you big babies! The internet doesn’t care about your “hurt feelings”.
I will continue calling guys (and girls) creeps if they are behaving like creeps.
I’ll consider stopping the use of the word creep when MRAs find a way to convince the men who use cunt, slut, bitch, whore, fatty and ugly as insults to stop.
Since I don’t forsee that happening anytime soon…. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLPZmPaHme0
nugganu IS gay, isn’t he? I mean, all-male bukkake events aren’t usually a feature of heterosexual fantasies.
Not to mention the self-loathing – you’d think he was one of those squeamish American women, the way semen makes him wax poetic: junk, gack, spooge…
And then there’s the racism. The word that comes to mind is “abscess”.
““I will fuck your ass to death you filthy fucking whore, ” it read. “Your only worth on this planet is as a warm hole to stick my cock in.””
I’m sorry, but that’s just creepy.
Hey @nugganu, do fuck off now, would you? Kthx bye
I suspect it derives from the same kind of impulse that compels people to write vitriolic homophobic letters, including phenomenally detailed descriptions of the kind of acts that the writer imagines the recipient gets up to. So detailed, in fact, that it can’t help but betray the fact that the writer thinks about this kind of thing a lot.
It’s more than likely that nugganu is taking one of his own fantasies and, because he’s deeply ashamed that such images have entered his mind unbidden, he’s desperately trying to project them onto someone else.
The really sad thing is that only prudes and puritans would care. As you say, while a bukkake session with ten guys might raise eyebrows in some circles, it’s not illegal in a great many places, and if that’s the kind of thing nugganu gets off on, who am I to censure?
You only get to one of two things in life, if you want to maintain anything remotely like consistency and integrity:
1) Label a behavior wrong and seek the high ground to criticize it by refusing to engage in it yourself.
2) Answer things that you dislike by engaging in the same behavior, but then STFU with the complaining when you get what you give.
One or the other, the high road or the low. You can refuse to fight, you can bring a gun to a knife fight, but you can’t bring a gun to a knife fight and then complain that the other person’s knife is unfair.
You can complain about language used against you as wrong, and refuse to respond in kind. You can admit that your language is sexist, and claim that it is fair because both sides do it. You cannot complain about the language used against you, while using language that you admit is at least as bad as what you’re supposedly defending against.
Well you can, but it just makes you look ridiculous.
Well, yeah Snowy… that’s my point.:)
Of course, I also love how insults related to female genitalia aren’t gendered while “creepy” is somehow gendered. Makes perfect sense.
Nugganu is just pissed he can’t write porn well. Throat yogurt? Come on. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be come or spit (possibly from someone with a cold). This is why you have to have a beta reader, dude.
Ewwwww gosh I’m trying to eat breakfast here!
It is 1:11 in the afternoon… time to start the heavy drinking.
Throat Yogurt was the name of my prog-rock band in the early 00s. We we were like Dream Theater, but, y’know, more yogurt inspired. Good times, good times.
Did you have many backstage bukkake sessions?
Backstage! Pshah! They were the closing act. Didn’t play well in rural Wisconsin, however. That might have been a tactical error.
[goes to Google “Throat Yogurt Wisconsin”]
I get what you’re saying, Daphne B., but you have to understand; the position nugganu is assigning to David is the “female” position (because he can’t imagine gay sex as anything other than straight sex with one of the players swapped out with the wrong gender; it’s definitely not its own thing) which is, in his mind, inherently derogatory. And then added to the humiliation of being “the girl”, “the guys” are all <i
I get what you’re saying, Daphne B. I am not nugganu (yay me!) but this is what it seems to me that he is thinking: The position nugganu is assigning to David is the “female” position (because he can’t imagine gay sex as anything other than straight sex with one of the players swapped out with the wrong gender; it’s definitely not its own thing) which is, in his mind, inherently derogatory. And then added to the humiliation of being “the girl”, the other men involved are all black, which adds an additional layer of humiliation because in nugganu’s mind black people are lesser people than white people.
@improbable joe, there are only two things on the mras list that are conceivably gender based insults and none of them are violent or sexualized threats.
That one appears gendered, and is likely most often a gendered insult. Also, it is something a feminist is extremely unlikely to say.
This is primarily a homophobic insult, but can be used to gender police as well. Also, yet again, something a feminist is unlikely to say. In addition, the flip side, being called a “dyke” for being a woman who does not mean gender stereotypes is damned common too.
Most of the things on the list are actual direct criticisms regarding a negative attitude towards women, or sexual based shaming (which women get in droves too, and in regards to topic that are in no way related to dating or sex, which doesn’t happen nearly as much to men). Some of these are not even conceivable as insults against the person at all:
And these are clearly not in the ballpark of
You know, I am not the most unabrasive person at all times (shocker, I know), so I have been called an asshole and a number of other insults. This is not even in the same ballpark as, when someone sees your comment on the issue of capitalism, sending you a detailed threat about raping you and biting off your nipples because you happen to have a more feminine coded nym (and, yes, that is an actual personal example).